The fundamental steps of processing silver halide color photographic light-sensitive materials generally include a color developing step and a deslivering step. That is, an imagewise exposed silver halide exposed silver halide color photographic light-sensitive material is introduced into a color developing step, wherein silver halide is reduced with a color developing agent to produce silver and the oxidized color developing agent in turn reacts with a color former to give a dye image. Subsequently, the color photographic material is introduced into a delivering step, wherein silver having been produced in the preceding step is oxidized with an oxidizing agent (usually called a bleaching agent), and dissolved away with a silver ion complexing agent usually called a fixing agent. Therefore, only a dye image is formed in the thus processed photographic material. In addition to the above-described two fundamental steps of color development and desilvering, actual development processing involves auxiliary steps for maintaining the photographic and physical quality of the resulting image or for improving the preservability of the image. For example, there is a hardening bath for preventing the light-sensitive layer from being excessively softened during photographic processing, a stopping bath for effectively stopping the developing reaction, an image stabilizing bath for stabilizing the image, and a layer removing bath for removing the backing layer on the support.
In general, ferricyanides are employed in a bleaching solution as bleaching agents. However, the bleaching solution containing ferricyanides are disadvantageous in that an exhausted bleaching solution must be exchanged for a fresh bleaching solution and ferricyanide ions, which are discharged by overflow or carrying into washing water subsequent to the bleaching processing during processing and ferrocyanide ions which are reduction forms of ferricyanides, can form cyanide compounds by photogchemical oxidation. These cyanide compounds are strongly poisonous and cause severe pollution.
On the other hand, potassium bichromate, ferric salts, persulfates, quinones, copper salts, etc., have been heretofore employed as bleaching agents other than the ferricyanides. However, these are also disadvantageous in view of their weak oxidizing power and difficulty in handling.
In recent years, bleaching methods employing ferric ion complex salts (e.g., aminopolycarboxylic acid-ferric ion complex salts, particularly iron (III) ethylenediaminetetraacetate complex salts) as major components have been generally utilized in view of requirements for rapid and simplified processing and prevention of environmental pollution. However, the problem with bleaching solution containing ferric ion complex salts is that a long period of time for bleaching is required due to their weak oxidizing ability.
Accordingly, it has been proposed to add various bleach accelerating agents to the bleaching solution in order to perform sufficient bleaching processing. Among these bleach accelerating agents, the compounds represented by the general formula (II-a) or (II-b) described below are effective and when a bleaching solution to which the compound is added is employed, the period of time required for bleaching processing can be remarkably shortened, for example, it can be carried out within 6 minutes and 30 seconds, and further within 2 minutes and 30 seconds.
This fact is very preferable in view of rapid processing. However, it has been found that the photographic properties are degradated, in particular, the gradation of a cyan image is softened, in the case where the processing time for bleaching is shortened using these compounds. This problem is particularly serious in methods wherein the fixing processing is carried out directly after the bleaching processing without washing with water.